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up. 100 Car-fares, church, etc..................... 100 Wages and sundries......................... 200 ------ Total..................................... $2000 In the bank nothing. But what shelter can this refined, intelligent family find to-day for $400? Certainly nothing with modern conveniences. The lack of these is _made up by women's work_--hard, rough work. And that is the crux of the servant problem to-day. It is the reason why more families do not go into the country to live. The work required in an old house to bring living up to modern standards is too appalling to be undertaken lightly. In England the Sunlight Park and other plans, in America the Dayton and Cincinnati schemes, are samples of what is being done for the $500 to $800 family, but where are the examples (outside the Morris houses) for the salaried class for whom we are pleading? The great army of would-be home-makers are forced into a nomadic life by the exigencies resulting from the great combines--a shifting of offices, a closing of factories, a breaking up of hundreds of homes. I believe this to be the _chief factor_ in the decline of the American home--a hundred-fold more potent than the college education of women. The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but is that the whole story? In the present order of things it seems to be inevitable that the gain of one class in the community is loss to another. Probably the law has always existed, and only the very rapid and sudden changes bring it into prominence, because of the swift readjustment needed, an operation which torpid human nature resents when consciously pressed. For instance, the efforts of the philanthropist and working man together have succeeded in shortening hours of labor and increasing wages--without, alas! increasing the speed or quality of the work done, especially in the trades which have to do with materials of construction, so that house-building has about doubled in cost within twenty-five years, largely due to cost of labor. This increased cost has fallen heavily on the very group of people least able to bear it, the skilled artisan, the teacher, and the young salaried man. Again I call attention to the need of a philanthropist who shall raise his eyes to that group, the hope of our democracy, those whom he has held to be able t
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